Hi,

I'm very much interested in CFD and would like to benefit from it in my work. I'm a process engineer with BSc in chemical engineering and work in a refinery in catalytic group.

My main interest is to model equipments, vessels, furnaces and reaction systems in my work. I might be able to persuade my boss to go to a commercial CFD package, however, if there is another alternative I'm open to suggestions. We have many PC's at work all running winxp, I know that some CFD packages can work in parallel with other PC's.

I would like to be able to use the CFD at home as well; currently I have a laptop running winxp home. However, would not mind buying a disk top PC for home and not restricting my self to a single operating system

What is the best way to start, what CFD package should I aim for, what PC specs should I go for and what operating system should I consider? Why?

Cheers,

SM

wow, thats one hell of a question but my 50 cents is.......

pacakge....any comercial code will do, personally I'm a star-ccm+ fan as its a brand new, very fast, very clever bit of code

PC specs, go for linux not win xp if possible, and you are right in saying you can run parllel in all the commercial codes but doing it on windows is currently very tricky (basically windows security is set up to stop exactly the type of process that cfd uses) but im not sure what this windows server computer cluster thingy is like. But unix/linux clustering is well proven, not that hard and a lot quicker than windows will ever be

enjoy....

Thanks for your help. I downloaded star-ccm+ for trial and will try to get a feel for it. any other pointers are apreciated.

cheers,